Spam

Spam

Is spam really a problem? In minutes I was able to get rid of about a hundred spam messages from my inbox this morning. The email set up I have doesn’t send things to a “spam box”, but it does mark the spam messages very clearly. I’m sure there is a way to do this, but honestly I have kind of got used to it all being in one place. This let’s me know if any legit messages are being marked as spam. I have had a few very important contacts marked as spam before. Because press agents send a ton of bulk messages, they get marked as spam often. So I have everything go into the main inbox and deal with it there. As I said, it takes me just minutes to go through and clean out the spam. It doesn’t bother me much at all.

Once I take a minute or two to clean out the spam messages, it takes me several hours to take care of the legit email. I think that it is that long daily trek through legit email that makes people hate email. Then they need a scape goat to blame and spam is one easy target. It’s junk mail and is unwanted, so it is easy to blame. But if people were being honest they would admit that spam is nothing in the grand scheme of things.

So what is the solution? Well Google Wave tried to solve this, but it was a total flop. People treated it as a social network, added everyone they are connected with through Twitter and Facebook, and then found it to be a productivity killer instead of a help. Now if I had the money to hire a programmer I could automate most of my email. Each press agent has their own strange little quirks. So the program would have to treat each contact differently. So if the inbox got a message from Dude@fakepressagent.com it would look for the text “FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE” and post everything from that to “###” on my website as news. But when hottie@notrealpressagent.net sent a message it would just have to post everything until “For more info”.

Of course there would have to be some major formatting to clean up everyone’s horrid html emails (I despise html email), but that would be in the backend. Then there would have to be a way for me to preview the news pages and reject or make live the posts before the public is able to see them, but I already have that. The problem is that I (along with 99.9% of the people out there) don’t have the resources to automate email in this way. So until then I think we should just say we hate email. Spam is not the issue. It’s the legit email that creates work and work sucks. Sorry Monty Python. I still love ya!